[LINK] E-mail question

[Ivan Trundle]

On 13/06/2007, at 11:54 AM, Craig Sanders wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 02:54:49PM +1000, Ivan Trundle wrote:
>> Thanks to everyone who responded both on and off Link.
>>
>> It looks to me as though there is no standard, and the use of angle
>> brackets isn't of any real help to those who are unable to read
>> longer URLs.
>>
>> Although it has been suggested that we use TinyURL or similar to send
>> out this kind of information, I regard using a third-party website to
>> direct people to our website as a highly unprofessional.
>
> you know that there are several cgi scripts around that do basically
> the same job as TinyURL? it would be trivial to write, anyway - just a
> lookup table of small_url -> stupid_url and issue a 302 redirect.

Yes, I do know and I can write my own cgi script, but it's of little  
help for a bunch of reasons that I won't go into here. The effort  
involved in ensuring that short and long match is greater than the  
effort required to do nothing more than contact those who can't use  
the URL, which doesn't always go beyond 80 characters.

> you could install one on your own web server.
>
>
> you could even do it with apache conf RedirectMatch rules, but then  
> you'd have
> to edit the apache config and reload apache every time you needed  
> to do it.

Could do this also, but URL matching would be quite a management  
process. Too many variables, alas.

iT